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Social Network Anti-patterns

While social-network-portability documents what to do to put your site on the open social web and be a good user-centric service in general, it's been noted that not everyone follows such advice and instead opts for a bunch of alternative either one-off (wasteful) or downright user-unfriendly tactics. This page documents such anti-patterns of social network design and implementation

Upload your Address Book

Many social networking sites ask you to upload your address book.

This is a bad idea. Especially since so many sites seem to use your uploading of your address book as tacit/implied permission to spam all your friends, e.g.:

Enter your gmail login and password

Giving any site your login credentials/permissions for another site is a very bad idea.

Not only can you not trust that the site will treat your login credentials with proper care, but it is very bad user interface design. These sites that ask for your gmail login are teaching users a very bad habit, a habit that is akin to what phishing sites depend on.

There may be a blog post on this by Chris Messina, but where is it? Perhaps someone can find it.

One Unified Social Network

Several companies are trying to build the "one unified social network" (to rule them all) where they own/control the social network, and you're "allowed to" build applications on top of their proprietary platform. The most recent example of this is perhaps Facebook.

This is a bad idea for the same reason you don't see "one universal blogging service".

Other examples of folks walking down this path:

Socialstream - a Google sponsored project at CMU. Key quote: "a unified social network that, as a service, provides social data to many other applications". See also references in this Forbes article: Google's Secret Society.

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The hope is that these services will see the potential upside of providing open user profiles and social networks through social network portability and thus enable syndication of such data, as popular blogging services do.